27 posts categorized "VCs Around The Web"

VCs like to think that they are marketing geniuses. We really do. We meddle more in the marketing of our portfolio companies than any other area. If you have a chance to sit in on a startup board meeting, you can see this in action. The CFO gives a finance update and a few cursory questions are asked. The VP of Engineering talks about development and board members sit around the table nodding appreciatively. Then the VP of Marketing gets up and suddenly everyone around the table has a point of view. Poor VPs of Marketing. Their role at board meetings is to be diplomats and pretend that we investors are marketing geniuses. Frankly, the reason investors have so many opinions about marketing is that we can fake it far more convincingly than in other areas of the operations -- faking it when it comes to scalability issues, or which technical standard to endorse, or revenue recognition for term licenses, etc. is a lot harder. But show us a proposed product name, web page layout or advertising slogan and we are full of suggestions.

That being said, I have been thinking a lot about marketing recently. I recognize that I have undermined my own credibility on the subject already. But that's never stopped me before. I recently gave a talk at FOO Camp that was entitled "Building a Better Virus: Viral Marketing and Epidemiology," or as Christine Herron renamed it in her write-up of the talk, "David Hornik Learns About Marketing from Syphilis." Christine does a great job of capturing the major themes of the talk. I've spent almost the last decade watching great marketers figure out how to leverage the Internet to generate buzz, traffic and sales. And from what I've seen, the term "viral marketing" was aptly named. The lessons from online marketing are the same as those we learn from influenza, herpes, ebola, AIDS, etc. -- great ideas stay with you, spread like wildfire, become a part of your daily routine, are fun, and are tough to shed. In short, great ideas are "infectious."

The best marketing often springs out of the characteristics of the product or service being promoted. In some instances, those viral characteristics have been designed into the product itself. For example, the viral nature of Evite or Tickle or LinkedIn were carefully calculated to maximize their infectiousness. Other times, however, a product or service becomes viral by virtue of how it is used or talked about. Such serendipitous marketing can take the form of really great word of mouth (the power of Walt Mossberg, Slashdot, Boing Boing, TechCrunch, Digg, Reddit). Or it may take the form of some unexpected use of a product or service that does a particularly good job of highlighting its usefulness (YouTube got great early exposure -- and still does -- as a result of the wildly viral content made available on the platform).

I recently experienced a great example of fortuitous marketing springing from the strength of a product itself. I'm an investor in a company called Splunk that has created a search engine for the data center -- it takes log files from throughout your enterprise (app server, web server, router, database, etc.), correlates those logs and allows you to search across them. In an effort to make it as simple as possible for end users to try out their software, Splunk created a service that hosts the Splunk software in the cloud -- you can import your own data set into the Splunk server and give the software a try. Various data sets had been imported (voip, email, etc.) into the Splunk service without much fanfare, but when someone imported the leaked AOL Search Data into the service it got a pileofattention. Suddenly it was possible to navigate the AOL data by search term, by user ID, by time sequence, etc. What was otherwise pretty impenetrable data became searchable and navigable and, as a result, the Splunk service got the company a whole lot of marketing bang for the buck. While the Splunk team appreciated the marketing value of making the service available for a test drive, they did not think to use the AOL Data as a sample data set. But once a user had imported the AOL data, it did a great job of getting attention and highlighting the power of the software. Now that's great marketing. (Herein ends the infomercial.)

What has become clear to me over the years is that great marketing is not purely about science. It is not purely about art. It is not purely about intuition. It is a powerful combination of art, science and a little bit of luck (perhaps driven by intuition). I have incredible respect for marketers who can combine both disciplines with a little bit of intuition to deliver results. Despite my natural VC tendencies to meddle in marketing's affairs, I will do my best to stay out of the way of the professional marketers. They are the geniuses, not I.

I've noticed Paul Graham's name poppingup a lot recently in the blogs I read. I wonder if it is just the new car phenomenon. Have you ever noticed that when you buy a new car, you see a lot more of them on the road? Suddenly it feels like everyone is driving a Prius (actually, in the Bay Area, everyone is driving a Prius). Well Paul Graham is my new car (sorry, Paul, I realize this is a pretty dubious analogy). I had long heard great things about Paul Graham but had not had the opportunity to meet him until a couple weekends ago at FOO Camp. After having the pleasure of hearing Paul speak, "presenting" with Paul and just plain old chatting with him, I am now a card carrying member of the Paul Graham fan club. But now, everywhere I turn, people are singing Paul's praises. Paul is today's Prius.

Paul gave a fabulous talk at FOO Camp about entrepreneurship entitled "What We Learned So Far From Y Combinator About Startups." Paul and his partners run a program called Y Combinator which is part incubator, part angel investment fund, part startup boot camp, part summer camp. Since starting the program, Y Combinator has funded 27 embryonic companies (usually at least two people strong because, as Paul points out, what does it say about you as an entrepreneur if you can't even convince at least one other person to work with you). While applicants for the Y Combinator program are technically applying for funding, as Paul rightfully points out, the most valuable thing that they are getting out of the program is advice. Paul and his partners aren't so much VCs and VAs -- Venture Advisors. And through 27 companies worth of advice, Paul has distilled a thing or two about what makes a successful startup.

As an initial matter, in his FOO talk, Paul pointed out that startup success is really just the absence of startup failure -- in Paul's own words, "to a large extent you can succeed in a startup by simply not failing." Easier said than done, right? You bet. The vast majority of startups fail. But Paul points to the biggest weapon entrepreneurs have against failing, and that is focus and determination. Paul has seen astoundingly smart people fail because they lacked the maniacal focus required to help a startup succeed against the odds. In fact, Paul goes so far as to say that smart isn't that important. There are lots of smart people. To him, smart pales in comparison to focus.

The second key to successful company building, according to Paul, is to start with the right product. The Y Combinator t-shirts read "Make Something People Want." Again, easier said than done. But, as Paul notes, the easiest way to make something that people want is to make something that you want. Yahoo! started out as a directory of Jerry and Dave's favorite links. Movable Type was born out of Mena's need for a better way to talk about herself. Jonathan started Friendster to find a girlfriend. Zuckerberg started FaceBook to find a girlfriend. Joe and Alon started JDate to find Jewish girlfriends. Ted started Dogster to find his dog a date. If you build something you want, chances are pretty good that someone else will want it as well. That has proven true time and time again -- from Apple to Google to Noah's Bagels.

The corollary to "build something you want" is to build something you know others will want. This is harder. It is a unique but powerful skill to have what I'd call "product empathy." It requires a lot of listening and a lot of luck. Happening upon the right product idea for other people is even harder than happening upon the right product idea for yourself. I think one of the biggest problems in the late 90's was that McKinsey people decided to quit consulting and went out looking for problems to solve. They either knew too little to actually solve the problems or didn't actually find a real problem to solve. Truly successful startups solving other people's problems are often started by domain experts who see big problems with the status quo and leave their industries to go solve those problems. That might work. But it is still really hard. It's a lot easier to really understand your own problems than someone else's.

A third characteristic of successful startups according to Paul is the ability to listen and react. Even companies building something that the founders themselves want need to listen to feedback on their product in order to morph their idea to appeal to the largest (or most valuable) constituency possible. As Paul points out, it is OK to be stubborn and have good judgment but it is better still to not be stubborn, even if you have bad judgment (obviously it is best to not be stubborn and have good judgment, and to complete the 2 by 2 matrix -- are you picturing it? -- it is death to be stubborn and have bad judgment). I can't think of a single startup in which I've invested or advised that ultimately built the exact product that the founders had originally envisioned. Startups are necessarily fluid and agile. It is what gives them a chance of succeeding despite the long odds and giant competitors.

Paul had some other great thoughts on what makes successful startup founders. I will have to save that for another day. In his FOO talk, Paul laughingly noted, "you can get surprisingly far by being selfish." It seems to me that Paul has chosen to be anything but. Rather than build an Eco-Yacht or sit by the pool, Paul has chosen to share what he has learned building his own successful venture with a new generation of entrepreneurs. That's lucky for the entrepreneurs and VCs alike. I look forward to spending more time with Paul in the near future and continuing to learn more from his experiences. Maybe I should apply to Y Combinator.

When I was a lawyer, I always knew when I was done with a project. After all, if you are working on a financing and the company receives the money and the investors receive the stock certificates, you are pretty much done. Same is true of a licensing agreement. You draft the agreement, negotiate a lot, but when both parties have signed the contract then you know you are done. But not so of the venture business. You are never done. There aren't discrete projects. There aren't a set of tasks to get done in any given day. There are only a bunch of opportunities to be considered, a bunch of smart people to be met, a bunch of interesting companies to spend time with, a bunch of new technologies to explore, a bunch of blogs to be read, a bunch of email to answer, a bunch of breakfasts to be eaten. It is a bunch of stuff. And each VC has his or her own theories about which of those things is truly important to be a successful venture capitalist.

One of the reasons I spend a lot of time speaking at and attending events is because I think it kills a lot of those birds with a single stone. I spent last week speaking at the Microsoft VC Summit and at TiEcon 2006, and I also had the good fortune of attending a planning dinner for this year's Web 2.0 Conference coming up in November. I got to meet with a bunch of smart people, learn about a bunch of interesting opportunities, explore a bunch of new technologies and, in this instance, eat a bunch of good dinners. All in all a very productive week. And while I'm still having a hard time explaining to my family what precisely a VC does for a living, I'm pretty sure all of those things are part of the job description.

Along those same lines, I will be speaking at three really interesting events coming up in the next few weeks. I have no doubt that I will have the opportunity to meet with a bunch of interesting people and learn about a bunch of interesting stuff at each. But in hopes of facilitating that, here's some info on the events. Come on by and join the conversation.

June 14th (Bay Area): Under the Radar Conference: Why Digital Media Matters. The latest installment of the great Under the Radar conference series will focus on new companies in the audio and video world. The panelists at Under the Radar are some of the smartest folks in and around new media (Rafe Needleman, Chris Saaca, Zander Lurie, Michael Arrington and, because we don't see each other enough, Jeff Clavier, among many other thoughtful folks) and the presenting companies are always entertaining (Amiglia, Blip.tv, BroadbandSports, Dabble, Filmloop, Flukiest, Grouper, Jumpcut, Motionbox, MusicStrands, Pando, Podbridge, TagWorld, among many others). For all you American Idol fans out there, this is the tech conference for you. For the best price available for the conference, register here, and get the VentureBlog discount (VentureBlog is becoming the eCoupons of tech conferences).

June 26th (NYC): Venture Voice Startup Workshop. For those of you who haven't heard the Venture Voice podcast before, you should definitely check it out. It is hosted by Greg Galant, who does a fantastic job of asking the right sets of questions and getting people to talk about the stuff that matters. Greg is going to put those same skills to use in his upcoming Venture Voice Startup Workshop. The event is going to be a discussion of "how to start and grow innovative businesses." The speakers include successful entrepreneurs and venture investors alike. Most importantly, I will have the pleasure of sharing the stage with Dick Costolo again, which is always great fun. If you are interested in attending the Workshop, you can register here. Be sure to put in the Referral Code "vblog" to save $50 off the price of the event.

UPDATE: My appologies to those of you who were intereseted in registering for the Under the Radar conference and couldn't click through to the VentureBlog discount. I have fixed the link above or you can click here to register. Sorry about that.

In a Woody Allen moment, I was reading the DSM IV (the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual for mental illness) to make sure I didn't have the mental equivalent of a "tumor the size of a golf ball." But, as Woody Allen himself points out, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get you, and sure enough, I've diagnosed myself with a full blown mental illness -- it's called Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) or, as I've renamed it, Venture Capitalitis. Of the Personality Disorders available to me (Histrionic Personility Disorder, Antisocial Pesonality Disorder, Schizoid Personality Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder, etc.), Narcissistic Personality Disorder may be as good as mental illness gets. Which is a good thing because best I can tell NPD is running rampant on Sand Hill Road.

The DSM IV is the Fourth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Its purpose is to assist mental health practitioners in diagnosing and differentiating among mental illnesses. Accordingly, it takes the form of a list of diagnostic criteria which, if met in sufficient numbers by a particular person, indicates that that individual has the particular mental disorder in question. The diagnostic criteria for NPD are telling. NPD is diagnosed by "a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts," -- sounds like VCitis already doesn't it. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is "indicated by five (or more) of the following:"

1) Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g. exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements).

3) Believes that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions).

4) Requires excessive admiration.

5) Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations.

6) Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends.

7) Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.

8) Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.

9) Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.

Now I don't mean to be critical of my brethren in the Venture Capital industry, nor of myself for that matter, but tell me if that doesn't hit the nail on the head. Forget about meeting 5 of the criteria. How about 8 or 9? This Web 2.0 stuff is all well and good but I can tell you what my next investment will be in -- a mental health facility on Sand Hill Road.

It is hardly a revelation to state that the Internet is an astonishing resource. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the Internet is the incredible amount of information it makes available at the click of a mouse. Blogging has undoubtedly escalated the amount of information being shared but, far more so, the dissemination of government mandated information via the web has created huge pockets of searchable information that otherwise required pretty significant resources to unearth. And for individuals focused on business, there is an unending amount of interesting information available in filings with the SEC.

One such snippet of information about the Venture Capital industry was recently published in a registration statement for Tumbleweed Communications. Tumbleweed purchased a Sequoia Capital backed company called Corvigo. In connection with that acquisition, Tumbleweed registered about five million shares of stock in the name of Sequoia's various limited partners (known as "LPs") -- specifically, the investors in Sequoia Capital's tenth fund (Sequoia Capital X). While the names of the investors in a venture capital firms are generally not public information, in this instance they are a matter of public record (a complete list of Sequoia's LPs -- give or take a few really small cats and dogs -- can be found on page 14 of the Tumbleweed registration statement). Sequoia has a fairly typical mix of investors: Universities (e.g., Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc.), Foundations (e.g., Carnegie Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, etc.), Fund-of-Funds (e.g., HarbourVest, Knightsbridge, etc.), and high profile individuals (e.g., Andy Bechtolsheim, Wu-Fu Chen, Ed Kozel, Ram Shriram, Jerry Yang, etc.).

Noticeably absent from Sequoia's LPs are public pension funds like CalPERS. Much has been written about the impact of recent lawsuits requiring public pension funds to disclose venture capital firm results under the Freedom of Information Act. We've pointed to Tim Oren's excellent discussion of the topic in the past. As Tim rightfully points out, the result of requiring public pension funds to reveal venture returns is that the best funds will simply not accept public pension funds as investors. The proof would appear to be in Sequoia's LP list -- just one of the many interesting facts to be discovered by scouring the SEC filings.

NB: As PE Week Wire rightly points out, while there are no public pension funds, there is still one public university (University of California). Mea culpa. Nonetheless, I still strongly believe that forced disclosure will result in funds like August and Sequoia avoiding investment from public institutions like calPERS and the University of California. I guess we'll have to wait a few years before we get a registration statement that will answer that question with respect to Sequoia's latest fund.

I spent the better part of my day today at one of my portfolio companies. It was time well spent and I am glad that I did it, but it wasn't time that I had planned on spending. Nonetheless, an issue arose that made it necessary for me to make time and so I did. Meanwhile, another one of my portfolio companies has a separate issue brewing and I suspect it will require more of my time in the coming days as well. I don't object to spending extra time working with my portfolio companies -- not only is it my job, I truly enjoy it -- but it raises an interesting issue about time management as a Venture Capitalist.

What do VCs do all day? My general sense of the job is that VCs spend their days doing one of three things: 1) working with existing portfolio companies (attending board meetings, interviewing potential executives, helping with sales, etc.); 2) looking for future portfolio companies (reviewing executive summaries, meeting with new companies, engaging in due diligence, etc.) and 3) networking (attending and speaking at conferences, judging business plan competitions, doing breakfast, etc.). And, in reality, networking is just a subset of numbers 1 and 2 -- we network with lots of academics, service providers, entrepreneurs, executives, etc. in hopes that they will either introduce us to some potentially interesting company or ultimately be helpful to our portfolio companies in some way.

Many of the companies in which I invest spend more money than they make for considerable periods of time. Given the early stage at which I invest, this is neither surprising nor necessarily concerning (even those companies that could be cash flow positive if they so chose, often go negative in an effort to accelerate their growth). Nonetheless, it is an important factor with which I must deal as I try to help my portfolio companies move forward. After all, at some point any company burning more cash than it makes will have to acquire more money or go out of business.